The
United States also beefed up
penalties a few months ago,
tripling the potential jail
terms for dealers caught with
800 or more pills to at least
five years and three months;
those caught with 8,000 or
more would serve at least 10
years if convicted. DEA agents
and detectives say Israelis
have been involved in almost
all the major busts."

"According
to the New York Times, the
(Arizona) ring purchased
Ecstasy pills "from a man
named Ilan Zarger, a drug
supplier based in Brooklyn who
has ties to the Israeli
mob."

"The
Israelis are veterans. Some
served in elite units and
intelligence units," said a
New York narcotics agent.
"They know all the tricks of
surveillance and
counter-surveillance. They are
very hard to catch.

Yup!
Now, about that Israeli spy ring story,
y'know, the one with all the phoney "art
students" sellin' pictures to DEA
officers...

By Samuel M. KatzMomentMag.com

ISRAEL has long been known for its
wholesome Carmel oranges and leather
sandals. Today, however, their main trade
is in the virtual monopoly on the global
trade of Ecstasy.

It is a muggy summer's Saturday night
in Tel Aviv, and throngs of young people
have gathered outside Allenby 58, one of
the city's hottest nightspots. Many are on
weekend leave from the army; the young men
sport Levis and Polo shirts, but their
military crewcuts give them away. They
smoke with the fervor of condemned
prisoners. Some cruise up and down the
seedy thoroughfare, talking on their
cellular phones. Outside the club, a young
woman dressed in a red tank top and short
black skirt sits on the hood of a white
Subaru, a half-smoked Marlboro dangling
from her lips. "When are you going to be
here?" she shouts into her pelephone, as
Israelis call it. "Remember to bring the
'X'!"

'X' is XTC, or Ecstasy, the newly
fashionable and illicit mind-altering drug
with a reputation for suppressing
inhibitions. Inside the crowded disco,
amid the earsplitting sounds of Europop
and hip-hop, little pink pills of "X" are
freely consumed-contributing to a wild
sense of abandon.

Tel Aviv, Israel's jewel on the
Mediterranean, may at first glance seem an
unlikely setting for the kinds of vices
that plague American and European cities.
In Israel, where young men and women are
required to serve in the army, citizenship
has traditionally meant sacrifice and
self-discipline. Drug abuse and related
crimes have been considered byproducts of
affluent nations, spoiled by wealth and
comfort.

But Ecstasy, along with marijuana,
hashish, heroin, and cocaine, is heavily
used and traded in Israel today, in what
some call a sign of the times.
Contemporary Israel is an affluent,
drug-consuming country-with an estimated
300,000 casual drug users and some 20,000
junkies. There are no reliable statistics
on Ecstasy use in Israel, but in 2000
alone, police confiscated 270,000 Ecstasy
tablets from smugglers, students, and
partygoers in a series of stings. That
same year, according to an online report
by the Israeli Authority for Combating
Drugs, Israeli agents confiscated more
than 80 kilograms of heroin, 30 kilograms
of hashish, 8,885 kilograms of marijuana,
and nearly 8,000 "sheets" (resembling
sheets of postage stamps) of LSD. Those
numbers may pale beside comparable
statistics for the United States where,
according to U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) estimates, more than
15 million junkies reside. But they add up
to serious drug problems, especially among
Israeli youth-and have led to
commando-style raids in tree-lined
residential neighborhoods of Jerusalem,
Haifa, and Tel Aviv. According to a report
of the United Nations Office for Drug
Control and Crime Prevention, 75 percent
of all crime in Israel is drug-related.
And, compounding Israel's worries, the
drug trade has led to troubling breaches
of Israel's borders with Egypt, Lebanon,
and Jordan.

According to a U.S. State Department
White Paper on Global Narcotics, issued in
1998, the Jewish State is "a
drug-consuming country with serious
marijuana, hashish and heroin use, and a
growing problem of cocaine, LSD, and
amphetamine consumption." But perhaps more
striking, the report found that Israel is
"no longer just a user nation, but like
Colombia, Thailand and Pakistan, it has
also now become a trafficking power."
Authorities say Israeli crime groups have
for several years had a virtual monopoly
on global distribution of Ecstasy (though
police say Russians are also major
players, and Colombian and Dominican
groups, realizing the potential for
profits, are gaining ground.)

On May 3, 10 Israelis, including
haredim, were arrested as members of a
four-nation smuggling ring that allegedly
sent hundreds of thousands of Ecstasy
pills from the Netherlands to the United
States, through Israel and Canada. Then a
few weeks later, police in Spain announced
they had captured Israeli Oded
Tuito, described as a major
international Ecstasy smuggler. Tuito was
wanted in the United States for allegedly
heading an organization that channeled
hundreds of thousands of Ecstasy pills
into the country from northern Europe. (At
the time of this writing, extradition to
the United States was still pending.)

At the end of May, Sammy the Bull
(Salvatore Gravano), the one-time
underboss of the Gambino family and
allegedly the head of La Cosa Nostra in
the southwest, pleaded guilty to running a
multi-million-dollar Ecstasy ring in
Arizona. According to the New York
Times, the ring purchased Ecstasy
pills "from a man named Ilan
Zarger, a drug supplier based in
Brooklyn who has ties to the Israeli mob."
The United States government had managed
to recruit "at least seven secret
informants within the Zarger
organization." Busts like this, some say,
represent a fulfillment of Israeli
patriarch David Ben Gurion's famous
prediction: "When Israel has prostitutes
and thieves we'll be a state just like any
other." Ideally Suited Drug Traders?

According to a U.N. study, illicit
drugs were virtually nonexistent in Israel
until 1967. They became available only
after the Six-Day War, when Israelis
suddenly found themselves in contact with
East Jerusalem Arabs, who had access to
the extensive cannabis plantations of
Lebanon and Syria. Hashish was suddenly
cheap and available. After the war, tens
of thousands of tourists from around the
world came to Israel, among them young
people from high schools and colleges in
North America and Europe. They volunteered
on kibbutzim and toured the new "greater
Israel"-in the process, turning curious
Israelis on to drugs. By the mid-1970s,
some of Israel's most popular musical
stars were rumored to have experimented
with heroin, cocaine, and hashish.

The links between Israeli narcotics
importers and Lebanese brokers were
strengthened after the 1982 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon. Lebanon has always
been a major source of narcotics flowing
to Europe and the United States. The poppy
fields of the Beka'a Valley supplied
manufacturers in Sicily and Marseilles
with the raw product needed to produce
heroin, and a considerable part of the
Lebanese economy is based on the export of
poppy products from the ports of Tyre,
Beirut, and Tripoli.

According to a Jordanian intelligence
officer who works counter-narcotics,
"Israeli soldiers marched into Lebanon
like liberating heroes-and smuggling
arrangements and routes were established"
soon afterward. Security along Israel's
northern border with Lebanon was
subsequently beefed up, but "the Lebanese
Border is a porous, poorly defined series
of fences, hills and wadis," according to
Border Guard Superintendent "Nachum," a
veteran of the frontier, whose identity
(as with others quoted in this story) is
withheld for security reasons. "There are
spots where the Lebanese border is higher
than the Israeli side of the fence. Deals
are made between Israelis and Lebanese by
the buyer tossing a wad of cash across the
fence, followed by the seller throwing the
bag of drugs," he explained during a
patrol of the border area near Kibbutz
Sassa. "For years our focus was stopping
terrorists from crossing the border, not
bags of dope."

"The border is far from hermetic," a
former border guard told me. Much of the
heroin and hashish passing from Lebanon to
Israel goes through the Allewite border
village of Raja'ar, just north of Kibbutz
Dan, and villages like it.

When the Syrians assumed de facto
control of Lebanon, they too reaped
enormous profits from the drug trade. By
1996, Syria had become a "major transit
country for hashish leaving Lebanon and
for opium and morphine entering Lebanon
from Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey" on
their way to Europe and the United States,
according to 1997 and 1998 U.S. State
Department reports on international
narcotics control. "Dealing drugs
[was] Syrian state policy,"
according to a bluntly worded 1992 report
by the Washington-based Center for
Security Policy. "Syria's role in the
international drug business goes far
beyond a few corrupt officials
facilitating drug production and
trans-shipment in Lebanon," it said. "It
is a multibillion-dollar, hard
currency-earning operation. The
contribution Syria is making to the U.S.
illicit drug supply in particular is
staggering. According to a DEA estimate,
20 percent of the heroin found in the
United States is coming from Syria and
Syrian-controlled Lebanon." In Israel,
there is enormous potential for profit. A
kilogram of poppies costs approximately
$7,000 in the Beka'a Valley. By the time
it gets to Beirut and is turned into
heroin, its value has doubled to nearly
$15,000, according to an article by
Shlomoh Avromovitch in
Ma'ariv. By the time it reaches the
Israeli border, its value is nearly
$40,000. By the time Israeli gangs have
made their buy, the price of the kilogram
has doubled yet again. Eventually, what
was once a $7,000 kilo of Lebanese poppies
becomes $600,000-plus worth of
street-ready heroin.

Drug smuggling along Israel's border
with Egypt is also robust. Bedouin
caravans, moving everything from
cigarettes to Russian prostitutes, know
where Israeli Defense Force patrols are
lax. In some places, the Bedouin and their
counterparts in Israeli organized crime
have built sophisticated underground
tunnels to smuggle contraband. The IDF
blows these tunnels up once they are
uncovered (so that they can not be used by
terrorists), but newer and more elaborate
tunnels simply spring up to take their
place. Until the recent intifada,
smuggling was so brazen, Border Guard
narcotics officers say, that Bedouin would
simply drive jeeps filled with laundry
bags of marijuana from the Sinai across
the border to Israel. Israel's
counter-narcotics efforts have sparked the
interest of police departments worldwide,
but according to one NYPD detective
working major organized crime cases in New
York City, "Israeli law enforcement has
been a day late and a dollar short in
gearing itself up for the war against
drugs."

So how did organized Israeli crime
rings become so adept at distributing and
marketing Ecstasy globally? According to
Antwerp police, Israelis have had
smuggling networks in place for years:
They shipped stolen diamonds through
Brussels and Amsterdam to points
worldwide. When a few small-time dealers
first came across Ecstasy, and when those
dealers successfully test-marketed the
drug in Israel, they were able to tap into
the existing diamond routes, authorities
say.

From there, the smuggling took on a
life of its own, in part because Israel
has lax banking laws, making it easy to
launder money. But experts also say it has
to do with the nature of Israeli society.
"Israelis are industrious, intelligent,
innovative, and they love to travel," says
a U.S. law enforcement special agent who
works criminal cases involving Israel.
"They are ideally suited for the global
drug trade." They were the first,
authorities point out, to realize the
criminal potential for this drug as a
"benign" narcotic they could sell and
market. It didn't have to be smoked,
snorted or injected; and it didn't leave
track marks or expose the user to risk of
HIV infection. That was the "genius,"
authorities say, of the Israeli
involvement.

The
'Love Drug'

In a country that embraces the charms
of Western luxury with singular zeal, few
fads have hit with the ferocity of
Ecstasy, the street name for MDMA, or
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, a synthetic
psychoactive drug with stimulant and
hallucinogenic properties. Combining
chemical variations of the stimulant
amphetamine or methamphetamine with a
hallucinogen, most often mescaline, MDMA
was first synthesized in 1912 by a German
company as an appetite suppressant. In the
late 1970s, its euphoric properties led
psychiatrists to prescribe "the love drug"
for married couples trying to rekindle
romantic feelings. Taken orally, usually
in tablet form, the drug is said to
produce profoundly positive feelings,
including empathy for others. Users say it
warms and profoundly relaxes them,
suppressing anxiety-as well as the need to
eat, drink, or sleep-for up to six hours,
enabling them to endure two-to-three-day
parties. Illicit use did not become
popular until the late 1980s and early
1990s, when it began showing up at dance
clubs in the United States, Europe, and
Israel. Israeli entrepreneurs sometimes
provided free samples as a marketing ploy.
Ecstasy's popularity may be partly
explained by the fact that it is
apparently not as addictive (or at $25 to
$40 a pill, as expensive) as heroin or
cocaine. Users have touted it as
"harmless"; it is produced in benign and
pleasing colors, such as green and pink,
and is often stamped with hearts,
four-leaf clovers, or even Stars of David.
But experts say the "harmless" image is
simply not real: The drug can cause
nausea, hallucinations, blurred vision,
muscle cramping and, in severe cases,
seizures, loss of consciousness, and
death.

The young men and women consuming
Ecstasy in clubs in Tel Aviv and other
parts of the country represent a new breed
of Israeli, raised on the pursuit of
pleasures glimpsed in shopping malls or on
cable TV, rather than on an ethos of
self-sacrifice and the greater Zionist
good. "There is fatal desperation inside
Israel that makes it understandable,
almost acceptable, for a youngster to take
a drug like Ecstasy," says a former U.S.
law enforcement official who worked in
Israel for four years. "Look at this
place. A lot of 18- and 19-year-olds have
cellular phones and nice cars, they are
raised on MTV and Hollywood, but instead
of drinking on campus to pass on to
adulthood they are manning roadblocks and
taking fire. Their news is filled with
reports of killings, corruption, and
rabbinical edicts-all bricks in a wall
that threaten their ultimate hopes of
living a Middle Eastern version of the
American dream. If you were young in this
country, and had money, wouldn't you take
a drug like Ecstasy? What's surprising to
me is the fact that everyone here isn't
hooked [on] the pill."

Since its first appearance in the 1990s
in Tel Aviv's bohemian Schenken Street and
"Florentine" neighborhoods, Ecstasy spread
rapidly to discos and popular hotspots.
"Israeli kids embraced the warm, feel-good
sensation they got from the drug," said a
Tel Aviv cop, "and it didn't have to be
injected or snorted." Possession of
Ecstasy is a felony in Israel with
penalties of up to 20 years in prison. But
as the Jerusalem Post has reported,
Israeli law-enforcement officials tend to
target the dealers, leaving the weekend
rave parties alone.

Israeli dealers are not content only
with local distribution, however. Working
with Dutch and Belgian criminal
connections, they were instrumental in
marketing the drug and creating the demand
in Europe and throughout the world,
according to DEA agents working in Europe.
They used Western Europe as a hub to
distribute Ecstasy globally, since the
pill-making technology and the chemicals
required to make the drug could easily be
found in the Netherlands and Belgium. With
their existing smuggling networks, the
Israelis easily "flooded the market in
Europe, in Israel, and in the United
States," according to a federal U.S. law
enforcement official in the Netherlands,
"and once the customers asked for more,
you could almost print the money
yourself."

The Ecstasy profits are enormous. It
costs 15 to 25 cents to produce one
Ecstasy tablet, which wholesalers will
sell for $2 a pill. Distributors sell it
for $10 to $15 a pill, and by the time a
drug dealer sells it at a disco or on a
college campus, it can fetch between $25
and $40. Thus, a $100,000 investment by an
organized crime group can, in a matter of
weeks, earn more than $5 million. Labs can
manufacture some 100,000 tablets in a few
days. Ecstasy is produced primarily in
Dutch and Belgian labs-ranging from
industrial-sized plants and mobile labs
hidden inside trucks or on floating
barges, to basements underneath farms and
factories. In the past year, about 50 labs
were dismantled by police in Holland and
Belgium, but they keep springing up in new
locations, DEA agents in Belgium say.

Packaged pills are sent overseas
through a variety of methods. Air parcel
companies, such as FedEx and UPS, are
among the most popular. Israeli
dispatchers will drive through Holland,
Belgium, and Luxembourg, stopping off to
ship their packages, according to drug
task force detectives in New York. "The
Israelis are veterans. Some served in
elite units and intelligence units," said
a New York narcotics agent. "They know all
the tricks of surveillance and
counter-surveillance. They are very hard
to catch." Law enforcement, however, is
slowly denting this pipeline. On April 5,
2000, U.S. federal agents intercepted two
40-pound FedEx packages of Ecstasy, that,
according to the Boston Globe, had been
shipped to hotel rooms in Boston and
Brookline, Mass. The recipients, Yaniv
Yona and Ereza Abutbul, were
Israelis.

A few months later, U.S. Customs
officials in Los Angeles seized Ecstasy
shipments of 650,000 and 2.1 million
tablets, respectively, on flights from
Paris; agents in upstate New York seized
100,000 pills that had been transported
across the St. Lawrence River from Canada.
In 2000, DEA and Customs agents seized
11.1 million doses of the drug (up from a
few hundred thousand in 1995). The United
States also beefed up penalties a few
months ago, tripling the potential jail
terms for dealers caught with 800 or more
pills to at least five years and three
months; those caught with 8,000 or more
would serve at least 10 years if
convicted. DEA agents and detectives say
Israelis have been involved in almost all
the major busts. They have included
Sean Erez, currently awaiting
extradition from the Netherlands;
Shimon Levita, a New York yeshiva
student who was sentenced to 30 months in
a federal boot camp for participating in
the ring allegedly run by Erez; and
Jacob Orgad, identified as an
Israeli national with operations in Texas,
New York, Florida, California, and Paris.
A man identified by Customs as head of one
of the biggest "drug importation rings,"
Israeli Tamer Adel Ibrahim, remains
at large.

New York and Miami (with considerable
Israeli populations) are major transit
points for the drug. The Tel
Aviv-to-Antwerp-to-Amsterdam-to-New York
City route is a classic smuggler's path,
says a Belgian police officer. But with
law enforcement lately scrutinizing
arrivals at JFK and Newark airport more
closely, Ecstasy distributors are now
focusing on Los Angeles and the West
Coast, where indigenous Israeli
communities also exist and demand is
high.

The Israeli Ecstasy rings have mainly
used Israelis (sometimes unwittingly) as
"mules," or couriers, to bring the drug
into the United States. Israeli nationals
living in Europe and the United States,
typically young and seeking some easy
cash, make ideal couriers. They don't fit
the image of a Colombian cocaine smuggler
and they don't usually arrive en masse.
Still, according to Dan Rospond, a
DEA agent working in the Netherlands,
"smuggling rings will often 'shotgun'
couriers on flights from Europe-either
sending a bunch on the same flight or
splitting them among several flights and
airlines [to] the same
destinations. If two or three are caught,
half a dozen still get through."

Perhaps that's why Erez used Orthodox
and Hasidic Jews from the New York area to
smuggle Ecstasy into New York's major
airports in 1999 and 2000. Young Hasidic
couriers typically took 30,000 to 45,000
Ecstasy pills into the United States on
each trip, according to a report by
David Lefer in the New York
Daily News, sometimes carrying as
much as $500,000 in drug proceeds back to
Erez, in Amsterdam. Offering $200 finder's
fees, the drug rings were able to
infiltrate yeshivas and rabbinical
seminaries, and recruit individuals who
looked innocent enough to pass through
customs without suspicion. In the insular
Orthodox communities of Williamsburg,
Brooklyn and Monsey, north of New York
City, recruiters found gullible youngsters
who thought they would be smuggling
diamonds, not narcotics. The reach of the
Israeli syndicate is truly global. In
September 2000, Japanese police arrested
Israeli David Biton on a charge of
smuggling 25,000 Ecstasy tablets into
Japan. "Ecstasy is to the new century what
crack was to the 1980s," said the DEA's
Rospond, and Israel has its finger on the
trigger.

Although Israeli groups have dominated
the Ecstasy trade for about a decade,
profit margins are so enormous that
organized crime groups from other
countries are now attempting to muscle in
on the market, an officer explains. "The
Israelis are not about to allow the
Albanians, the Serbs, the Poles, the
Chechens, the Nigerians, the Dominicans,
or even the Colombians to take away their
profits," says an undercover narcotics
detective. "There will be violence. There
will be bloodshed and we have to be
ready."

In Israel, and indeed around the world,
a new day is dawning in the consumption
and trafficking of a narcotic that resists
control. And at New York's JFK
International Airport, a new day dawns for
a small army of Immigration and
Naturalization Service and Customs
officers awaiting the arrival of El Al
Flight 001-the first of many daily El Al
flights from Israel. For years, customs
agents paid little attention to El Al
flights, but now, moments before 6 a.m.,
they are ready, waiting. They've got their
work cut out for them.

"Pick the nice Jewish boy out of a
crowd of nice Jewish boys," says a veteran
Customs inspector as he watches the
400-plus passengers search for their
luggage. "It is the needle in the
proverbial haystack."